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All Rise...

Judge Jennifer Malkowski recognizes the personal bests these athletes achieve on the track, but she certainly doesn't see any records broken in bed.

The Charge

When you run into yourself, you run into feelings you never thought you
had.

Opening Statement

Personal Best, a film I had always known as primarily a lesbian
romance, is really a story about two female athletes in which queer desire is
mostly a plot device to complicate and intensify the competition between them.
Audiences looking for a meditation on the nature of athletic competition won't
be disappointed with this beautifully shot film, but those hoping for an
interesting (and/or hot) depiction of a lesbian relationship will find
themselves less satisfied.

Facts of the Case

Devastated by her failure to make the 1976 Olympic team, young hurdler Chris
Cahill (Mariel Hemingway, Deconstructing
Harry) finds comfort in a new romance with star pentathlete Tory Skinner
(Patrice Donnelly, American Anthem). As their relationship develops, Tory
convinces her coach Terry Tingloff (Scott Glenn, The Hunt for Red October) to take Chris
under his wing. As Chris shows her true potential and Tory starts to falter,
Tingloff suspects that their relationship is meddling with their athletic
performances and decides to take matters into his own hands before the 1980
Olympic trials.

The Evidence

The fact that Personal Best is known as a classic lesbian movie says a
lot about the lack of high-quality lesbian movies, given the relative merits of
this girl-loves-girl-and-track-and-field tale. The relationship between Chris
and Tory is far too juvenile for their college to post-college age group and is
so unsexy that one almost feels like the filmmakers were trying to make it so. I
can already see these two climbing the lesbian-bed-death hill when their initial
flirtations consist of—I kid you not—burping, farting, and arm
wrestling. What kind of foreplay is "pull my finger?"

The two barely talk about their relationship on screen, but one interesting
scene highlights the low-level denial that apparently pervades it. Chris and
Tory are arguing about their workout schedules and they get so frustrated that
they talk about no longer living together. When Tory frames the situation in
break-up terms, Chris balks:

Chris: "Jesus Christ, Tory, we're friends." Tory:
"Yeah, we may be friends, but every once in a while we also fuck each
other. Either you move out or I move out and we really are just
friends."

At first, I thought that the subtlety of their relationship was interesting.
Personal Best is a film that sets up the queer couple early on and
basically takes their relationship as a tolerated/accepted given, rather than
making the whole movie a tortured, drawn-out coming out story like it's
contemporary, Desert Hearts. But the
aforementioned unsexy aspects of their story, coupled with comments from
writer/director Robert Towne on the commentary track, frame this scenario more
negatively. Towne describes setting the love scene in a child's room because he
wanted it to be about innocence and to make it like two children exploring their
bodies. He later talks about the lesbian relationship as being, "about
people growing up and experimenting the way kids do." Elsewhere in the
commentary, Towne expresses something between amusement and disinterested
fascination with the homophobia exhibited by members of his crew and reviewers
of the film. Certainly, Towne should be commended for backing the script in the
face of controversy about the lesbian aspects, but in his expressed attitudes
about homophobia and—more importantly—the "childish"
relationship he creates between Chris and Tory, he fails to create a
sufficiently respectful and complex queer romance, falling instead somewhere in
the realm of mild condescension. Towne needed a queer romance because he wanted
to mix love, sex, and competition in sports, and men and women rarely find
themselves in direct, high-level athletic competition. But to justify the plot
device, he should have put a little more effort and thought into the type of
lesbian love story he wrote. One consolation is that the straight love scenes
are unsexy in their own rights, with one highlight being a female character
giggling and holding her lover's penis while he pees.

A fun sexy time Personal Best is not, but in this film Towne
demonstrates a real passion for and understanding of what sports are all about
for those who play them. Making ample and expert use of slow motion and finding
all the best camera angles, Towne and his crew capture a bit of Leni
Riefenstahl's flare for filming Olympic events back in her classic sports
documentary, Olympia. Watching Tory run the long jump in the final
Olympic trial is a breathtaking study in determination, musculature, and
cinematography, for that matter.

Towne exhibits a real awe in the face of not just athletic performance but
the athlete's mindset and mental preparations. His camera lingers on their
little physical ticks as they get set on their starting blocks and the almost
zen state of concentration the shotputters display as they cradle the shot
between shoulder and neck. In the commentary track, Towne describes how he and
the editors started these shotput scenes with the slowest slow-mo and then
gradually sped it up to the standard 24 frames per second at the release point.
Most directors would have slowed down the release, delighting in the physical
movements at the climax of the event, but Towne understands that the release
point is all about motion while the slowness, the stillness, plays a larger role
in the moment of preparation. Towne often couples his gorgeous competition shots
with a sparse voiceover from Coach Tingloff summing up the psychology of each
event: "The high jump is a masochist's event. It always ends in
failure."

And speaking of Coach Tingloff and masochism, you'd better be into the
latter if you're about to sit through a movie about the former. If this
character was supposed to be anything other than an extremely loathsome villain,
then Towne was really far off on calibrating him. Tingloff is the kind of guy
who shouts and swears at his students without compunction, behaves like a sexual
predator, comforts crying athletes by calling them "dumb cunt[s],"
tells jokes about "faggots," and complains in a bitter and extremely
sexist manner about coaching a women's team. The sneaking suspicion that
Tingloff is supposed to be read as deeply focused and ruggedly charming in an
asshole kind of way makes his scenes almost unwatchable, so be forewarned.

This DVD release from Warner Bros. is adequately presented with minimal
special features. The 26-year-old image suffers from relatively little
scratching, though the horrendous '80s colors could be a bit more
vibrant—though perhaps it is a blessing that they're not! Still, Towne's
lovely compositions look pretty good on this DVD. Sound fares a bit worse, with
muddy dialogue accompanied by tunes that date the film much more than the
fashions. The included theatrical trailer is much more raggedy than the film
itself, with dirt and scratches marring the image. The commentary track features
Towne, Glenn, and Moore, though it's Towne and Glenn who do almost all of the
talking. The conversation and reflection is pretty dry, with the most
interesting bits being Towne's description of his cinematographic choices and
his comments about the lesbian aspect of the film. One also gets a good sense of
the film's commitment to realistic sports sequences from this commentary track,
with the participants talking at length about the casting choice of
athletes-turned-actors rather than actors who've been hitting the gym and about
the importance of shooting at the real Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon. Towne
makes some amusing comments about the idea of filming actors trying to compete
as real athletes. After reminiscing about the "pudgy, white legs"
running in Chariots of Fire,
Towne quips, "If you're doing a movie about Seabiscuit, you don't want two
guys in gunny sacks" playing the horse.

Closing Statement

Towne makes an astute summation of the film in his commentary track when he
explains, "One of the underlying themes about Personal Best is how
do you compete against someone you really love? And I think the answer is you
don't." According to Towne and to his film, you're always competing against
yourself. The realization of this interesting theme is one of the best reasons
for watching Personal Best, even if you have to sit through a flat
lesbian romance and an infuriating male lead.